Biblical Flood and geological deluge: the amicable dissociation of geology and Genesis

Abstract

AbstractThis paper summarizes debates, among European geologists in the early nineteenth century, about the possible equivalence (or non-equivalence) between the biblical account of Noah's Flood, and new and cumulative evidence for an exceptional watery catastrophe or ‘geological deluge’ in very recent Earth history. The ‘diluvial theory’ deserves to be taken seriously as an attempted explanation of some extremely puzzling physical features (many of them reinterpreted later as traces of a glacial ‘catastrophe’ or Ice Age). The ‘geological deluge’ was eventually recognized as having been far earlier in Earth history than any event recorded by literate human societies. Among geologists, although not always among the wider public, this gradual dissociation between biblical Flood and geological deluge was generally amicable, not acrimonious. It was facilitated by the concurrent development of biblical scholarship, which showed that earlier literalistic interpretations were no longer tenable (and were also destructive of religious meaning). What was transposed into geology in the course of these debates was the strong Judaeo-Christian sense that the world has had a directional and contingent history, which might have been punctuated by occasional catastrophic events.